Project 97
by PrincessDystopia
Summary: Merle Dixon, volunteer to the World Catastrophe Prevention Agency, has finally been assigned an objective: take this unknown man, known in his past as the infamous Murphy MacManus, and make him believe that his childhood was filled with nothing but abuse, loneliness, and the name Daryl Dixon. [The Boondock Saints/The Walking Dead cross-over one-shot]


**So, this is an idea that popped into my head during my drive to work one morning and has been stuck with me since. Of course, this one-shot makes no sense in parallelism with the plots of The Boondock Saints or The Walking Dead. Also, I decided to give Murphy and Daryl both middle names for the sake of this one-shot.**

**I hope you enjoy!**

* * *

"You can't separate twins."

Since this crazy plan was first presented to Merle, those four words seemed to be all he knew. It was common sense. Twins should stay together until they're ready to part on their own. It wasn't like a normal sibling relationship. These two had shared a womb at the same time. That should've been a decent enough argument. Merle sure thought so, but the Worldwide Catastrophe Prevention Agency saw it differently.

Looking at this unconscious man, Merle shook his head before burying it into his palms. That was another thing – this unknown person in front of him was a grown _adult_, not some child. Maybe if that had been the case, this would've been not okay, but maybe a little more acceptable. For the past year, he had known this was going to happen – he knew that one day, he'd have to change almost everything about himself to see that the plan would fall together perfectly, but he wasn't expecting this.

With a heavy exhale, Merle lifted his head, running a dry, calloused hand over his tired and worn face. How long had it been since he last slept? It felt like years. His eyes drifted toward the clipboard hanging from the foot of the bed. Curious, he snatched it tightly. "What a dumb name," Merle snorted. "Who the hell decided to name him Daryl?"

Project 97, or as he was known now as Daryl, had been lying like a stone in this same hospital bed for three days. In Merle's opinion, the birth name that had been given to him sounded so much better. Murphy reminded him of a famous Irish politician whereas Daryl reminded him more of a redneck, lowlife drug addict. That was the irony in it all. Merle was supposed to be the one who played the image he set in his mind of Daryl. In all reality, he'd never touched a drug in his life. He knew this was going to be tough. Kids were usually easy to convince when they weren't asking a billion questions. Adults, on the other hand, needed details and facts and lectures and things that Merle needed to provide for this man.

"We're going to strip his memories and implant him with new ones," Clarice, the head of the W.C.P.A., had told Merle days before as he watched the trackers wheel his new brother in on a stretcher. They had captured him with his true brother, his _twin,_ just as they were boarding a boat to Ireland. Whatever happened to the other twin, Merle didn't want to ask. Deep down, he knew the answer. The agency couldn't risk the two ever running into each other again.

A spike on the heart rate monitor attached to Daryl's body yanked Merle from his thoughts. For the first time, Daryl's eyes fluttered open only momentarily before settling closed once more. He'd been pumped with so much anesthesia that there was no way he'd be able to wake up now. However, one single, heartbreaking word escaped through from his dreaming world. "Connor," he breathed.

Merle stood, nearly knocking over the nearby tray of food that he'd been told to eat, and hurried out the door. The building this late at night was unnerving; during the day, thousands of bodies filled the hallways. Now, Merle felt as if he was the only conscious person within a hundred miles. Fishing for a cigarette in his jeans, he grumbled to himself and began to walk toward the exit door. He hated these clothes. Ripped, faded, stained jeans and an old, dirty T-shirt of a band he never even heard of just weren't him. They had to be now.

Outside the dome-shaped metal building, Merle lit his cigarette and immediately took a long drag. At least they weren't taking these away from him. Cigarettes were the only way he knew how to fend off stress and boy, was there a shit ton of that coming his way. How in the hell was he supposed to make this guy believe that they were brothers? They looked nothing alike, sounded nothing alike (of course, there was no promise that they could get rid of Daryl's Irish accent), and as far as Merle could tell, acted nothing alike. Then again, interacting with Daryl was foreign to him and would be for the next week or so, if he even woke up, that is.

The thought of Daryl dying twisted Merle's stomach painfully. A flat line would mean twenty-seven years of tracking, observation, and planning down the drain. He knew that investing so much into one person from the day of birth was a horrible idea. There were too many things that could've gone wrong. "He's a perfect candidate," Clarice had told Merle twenty-six and a half years back. "Perfect genes, perfect background, and of course, a perfect agency watching his every move until he's needed."

Merle scoffed sharply and rolled his eyes, bringing the cigarette back to his lips. This so-called "perfect agency" was nothing but a group of manipulative beings that called themselves human. He knew that by being a part of this experiment, he was being just as much a hypocrite as the next guy, but he didn't sign up for something like this. Guilt racked through him at the thought that he'd been involved in breaking up two brothers that loved each other more than life itself and possibly killing one of them. The W.C.P.A. brought forth a caring mindset for the remainder of the human race, but their actions in trying to take back the world from...whatever these creatures were counteracted what they were trying to portray.

Half a mile from the building Merle leaned against, moans echoed into the night sky from behind an electrified fence. He still wasn't sure what to call them. The scientists all had different names for the new race that popped up only a month ago. Had it only been a month? It felt like a lifetime. Nicknames flashed through his head as he watched what appeared to be a female nudge against the fence and immediately erupt into staccato convulsions. "Creepers" seemed to fit them perfectly. They never ran or even walked. They crept along, looking for anything with a pulse to turn into one of them. "Uglies," "infected," and "roamers" all seemed to apply to them, but considering that nobody could decide on a definite name, most everyone just called them "God's revenge."

Merle crushed the rest of his cigarette under his boot and turned back into the building sharply. He absolutely abhorred staring at those things for too long and yet, they were something that he had to struggle to tear his gaze from. More than the fact that they were wandering the world like they owned it now, he hated that the W.C.P.A. had predicted this for over fifty years – long before Merle was even born. He often wondered how many other people they'd observed like they were the children of the operation (in a way, he figured they were) like they had with Daryl.

As he meandered his way back to his new brother's room, Merle passed by a door, barely cracked open, with a large and intimidating sign that read, "AUTHORIZED PERSONELL ONLY" in annoying red letters. After half a second of an internal debate, he figured that technically, he was authorized personnel, even if it wasn't the kind they were directing it toward. With a quick glance down both ends of the narrow hallway, he slipped into the dark room and instantly wished he hadn't.

Long ago, back before Merle had a clue that anything like this could ever exist, his grandmother had once told him, "Curiosity is the devil teasing you." He never really understood what she meant until his life became intertwined with the W.C.P.A. Every single question he had ever asked left him feeling that it was a mistake and made him search for some way to rid himself of the information they had told him. If they could rip memories from the brains of their experiments, why couldn't they do it to those who slaved over computer screens for days upon days and who abandoned their families for the sake of the human race, the survivors, the "greater good?" Oh, that's right, because people like Clarice had drilled it into their heads that they were too valuable to start over with the information given to them.

Before him sat a simple desk with a tattered office chair positioned in a way that whomever was sitting in it rushed out in a hurry. Cautiously, he settled in it and stared at the one thing the desk held: a beige, bulky folder labeled "Project 97." Everything inside him screamed to not look inside the folder, to return to Daryl's side, to wait idly by until he opened his eyes. However, lately Merle felt as if the rules of the W.C.P.A. and the rules he was trying to set as some sort of moral code didn't apply to him, so without much hesitation, his fingers pried the folder open.

Paperwork sprawled with messy handwriting filled the piece of thin cardboard. Merle squinted hard, trying to make out the words seemingly written in haphazard places. Some script was sideways, some was upside down. It seemed that whomever wrote it wasn't paying much attention to the location of their words or they just didn't give a damn. Either way, it took him much longer to decipher everything than he had liked.

"Since day one," Merle whispered to himself, his tired eyes locking on the pictures underneath the papers.

Between his fingers he held memories captured by a camera of an infant. It seemed that whoever had taken these pictures had access to the hospital because this particular baby had been held in an incubator. Another of two babies, almost identical with the exception that one had a tiny mole just above the left side of his mouth, lying next to each other, their small hands clasped together. Then, one of the same infant, now five or six years old, kicking a soccer ball on a weed-infested, cracked piece of pavement. The last one was a newspaper clipping from Boston, Massachusetts. The child had grown to an adult in his mid-twenties, holding a gun next to his brother and bearded father in a courtroom just after they ended the life of a mobster.

The agency had tracked Murphy Finnegan MacManus' life from the day he was born until the day he was born again as Daryl Ryan Dixon. Placing the photos face-down on the desk, Merle ran his fingers on his bald head. He often blamed the stress of being part of something like this as the reason for his hair loss, but deep down he knew it was genetic. Hopefully that wouldn't be another thing he would have to lie about to Daryl about in the future. Eventually he knew that all the lies would overflow and he'd be caught in the storm of the truth, but he would worry about that when the time came.

The paperwork became Merle's next point of focus. Although he couldn't make out most of it, he felt as though he'd memorized the important things for his own benefit of course. Three piece of paper that had been stapled together were memory logs. They indicated which pieces of someone's past had been implanted in Daryl's brain. Shaking his head, Merle grimaced to himself. An actual child had to grow up in a household of an abusive father, an alcoholic mother, and a brother that was never around. That child was now Daryl, real or not. Now, Merle had to portray that brother that was like a ghost to his younger sibling, wandering in and out of his life when it seemed convenient for him. Just the thought of it made him crave another cigarette.

Sure, Merle had once had a brother of his own. Thinking on it, he would've been Daryl's age by now, which made the entire process much more painful. A bright-eyed, blond cutie struck down before he even had a chance by an eighteen wheeler. The body had been so mangled that at first, nobody could identify it. Merle could, though. When they called him into the autopsy room, he knew right away. That was him. That was his baby brother.

Standing from the desk, Merle pushed out the thought. Over the years, it had become easier to do that, but it would never be as easy as he wanted. Part of him didn't want it to be so simple. He didn't want to forget his brother, but now that he had been assigned a new one, he had to let go. The past didn't matter anymore, especially not to Daryl. Hell, his entire past would be a lie and he would never know.

"Poor bastard," Merle mumbled, now standing at the edge of Daryl's bed. He hadn't moved an inch since Merle left.

The clicking of a pair of heels brought Merle's attention to the doorway. In it stood a brunette beauty of only thirty who had gained too much power too early in her life. If it hadn't been for her father's sudden death, Clarice would still be an intern living in the shadow of her family. Now, she stood before Merle as somewhat of a god. A sultry, slim bodied, green eyed goddess who turned the heads of nearly every man she walked by. That is, with the exception of Merle. He'd finally admitted that there was once a time when he found her absolutely stunning. The way she constantly adjusted her thin glasses and peeked up at him through her long, curled eyelashes nearly drove him crazy many of times. Now, he could barely stand the sight of her.

"Merle," she greeted him, her voice rising goosebumps on Merle's arms and legs. She strolled toward Daryl's bed and grabbed for the clipboard at his feet. After a quick glace over, she let out what sounded like a scoff. "I guess I was expecting something different."

Something about her tone nearly set Merle off. Clarice was a cold person and she knew it. Often times, she flaunted how much she didn't care about anything else but her work. Her life revolved around making sure her experiments were successful. More often than not, it was at the expense of the experiments themselves. She didn't bother herself with their comfort or safety for that matter. All that she cared about was that she didn't fail. Failure was a word that didn't appear to be in her vocabulary.

"What were ya expectin'?" he questioned, working hard on his southern drawl. Georgia was just about as foreign to him as having a brother again was. Originally, Merle had been from North Dakota and transferred to the Atlanta base when he'd been assigned to Project 97.

Lifting her bony shoulders in a quick shrug, Clarice tossed the clipboard onto the nearby counter. "Someone who wasn't an infamous criminal," she snapped, narrowing her eyes at Daryl. "I'd just had higher hopes for this one, is all."

As much as he tried, Merle couldn't help but feel the need to jump to Daryl's defense. Maybe it was his inner brother awakening once more, or maybe it was just that he didn't enjoy Clarice's company. Whatever it was, it caused Merle to shake his head, knowing it would start some sort of fire inside the woman. "Your father was the one watching him this entire time," he pointed out, dropping the accent entirely. "He could've done something to steer 97 away from it all."

Merle had been warned of Clarice's short fuse, but never witnessed it for himself until this moment. As if a bomb had gone off inside her, Clarice slammed a petite fist onto the counter. Although she seemed dainty, she was strong – strong enough to knock over a jar of tongue depressors. With a thunderous shatter, the glass fell to pieces in the sink. In only a second, her pointed nose was nearly pressed against his, her eyes crossing as she stared him down.

"Don't you ever," she hissed, bringing a manicured finger to his face, "_ever_ mention my father again. He's done more for this agency than anyone else ever has. If it weren't for him, we'd have been gone months ago. Do you under-fucking-stand me, Merle? My father did all he could for this murderer to keep him alive and out of prison." As she spoke, spittle landed on Merle's face. He was much too afraid to wipe it off in her presence. "The bastard should grovel on my father's grave for everything that man did, as should you." She turned on her heel to leave, but stopped at the door. "If I ever hear you speak ill of my father again, I'll see to it personally that you become moaner shit."

The slam of the door confirmed her words. Merle made a mental note, as he turned back to face his new brother, never to even mention Clarice's father again. Even with all the noise, Daryl still remained motionless. His twin popped into Merle's head then. If the guy was even still alive, what was he doing now? Was he trying to find his brother? Of course he was. That's what family did, not that Merle would know much of that. His own family had disowned him years ago. Unfortunately, the W.C.P.A. had been right there, more than ready to adopt him into their dysfunctional lifestyle.

"Hey, man," Merle mumbled, watching as Daryl's eyes twitched underneath the thin lid skin. "I get that we're not going to be the best of friends at first, but I guess its my job to make sure you don't die or find out that you're not really who you think you are."

This was stupid, Merle figured. How could talking to basically a breathing pile of flesh make him feel any better? There really was no answer, but it did. Might as well build some kind of connection before he wakes up, he figured. Maybe that would eliminate some of the awkwardness that hew knew would come along with it.

"And, uh, don't worry about those memories," he continued. He kept his voice low, just in case Clarice or any of the other scientists had their ear pressed against the door. "If they were real, I would've been there. So, I just want you to know that I'm not the jackass that you're going to think I am."

Of course, there was no reply. Cupping his chin in his palm, his curled elbow resting on his knee, Merle let out a heavy sigh. He wanted, and didn't want, Daryl to wake up. If he truly was the perfect example of a post-apocalyptic survivor, then he needed to open his eyes soon and get out there to complete the mission that Clarice's father had originally started. Something about the fact that he always knew the dead would walk the earth unnerved Merle. Growing up, he'd always heard horror stories of the undead, but he never imagined that they could be a real thing.

If a man had committed his life to ensuring that at least one person could be the ultimate survivor, Merle felt obligated to help with that commitment, even if it left him with a million questions. Questions, he reminded himself, were forbidden with the W.C.P.A. and all their affiliations. You do as you're told without so much as a wondering stare. That was life with this agency.

(-)(-)(-)

"Look, little brother," Merle mumbled in a deep, convincing drawl, snaking his arm around Daryl's shoulders. The younger man glanced sideways at him, his slender fingers tightening around his crossbow. "We ain't got a lotta time here."

"Whatdya talkin' about, man?" Daryl answered as he narrowed his eyes.

The eyes were something that caught Merle off-guard when his new brother first sat up in that hospital bed three weeks ago. He had expected them to be wide, scared, and wild. Instead, Daryl's blue eyes had groggily shifted over to Merle's face and blinked twice before an all too innocent smirk grew on his face. "The hell you lookin' at, ya ugly bastard?" Daryl had muttered, weakly lifting a fist to punch Merle on his thigh. "Get me outta this place, will ya? We gotta to leave 'fore Pa gets home."

Waving a trembling hand toward all the chaos before them, Merle leaned his head to the side onto Daryl's. "Lootin's awaitin' us," he whispered dramatically. "We just gotta find the right suckers." His eyes, feeling more tired and heavy than they had in such a long time, locked on an RV being inspected by a white-haired man. He forced a sly grin onto his cracked lips and pointed toward him. "We're startin' there."

He had Daryl move in front of him as they shuffled down the rocky hill. Clarice had been right about one thing: Daryl's physical attributes were perfect for anything the world threw at him. He hopped down the ledges like they were clouds underneath his feet, grabbing for vines and tree roots whenever he felt needed. Merle, on the other hand, nearly tumbled down the hillside more times than he could count. Then, once they were on level ground and heading toward the RV, Daryl lifted his hand high over his head.

"Hey, man!" he called out, catching the attention of the elder. "My brother'n me need some food! Ya got any spares?!"

Merle stopped in his tracks, the word "brother" repeating over and over again in his mind. That had been the very first time he heard Daryl say it. He'd always expected that happiness would swell inside him, but instead he felt empty, sick, and a certain sort of bitterness that bubbled into a deep hatred for the W.C.P.A.

"The hell, Merle?" Daryl barked, glancing back over his shoulder at the older man. "Ya comin' or what?"

As the two rummaged through abandoned vehicles, knocked innocent civilians unconscious for their belongings, and sat together in safety on the roofs of high buildings, Merle couldn't shake his original thoughts. Peering down at his sleeping brother curled up underneath a ripped jacket, he cursed Clarice, he cursed her father, and he cursed the W.C.P.A. as a whole.

"You can't separate twins. You just can't."


End file.
